NETWORKS SCARING UP SOME FRIGHTENING FARE

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Halloween became, like Christmas, not just an event but a season. But with whole aisles in drugstores and card shops having gone black and orange five minutes after Labor Day, how can TV hold back on its own pumpkins-and-goblins act?

Some Halloween specials are best viewed with the lights on. Others are more foolish than ghoulish.

Some viewers might put The 100 Scariest Movie Moments (9 tonight through Saturday, Bravo) in the don't-turn-out-the-lights category, though even the most unnerving scenes -- those from Carrie, The Shining and Wait Until Dark come to mind -- are easier to take when they're in list form, so to speak.

The talking heads -- a decent title for a spooky movie if a band hadn't taken it -- include old horror hands Stephen King, Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Clive Barker. At 10 hours, it's a bit much, so be advised that the special counts down from least to most scary, with the Saturday installment reserved for the truly hair-raising.

AMC's eighth annual Monsterfest, now under way, offers eight days of horror movies and original programming through Sunday. (See amctv.com for the complete schedule.) One of the highlights is the Halloween-themed premiere of a weekly reality series, FilmFakers, at 10 p.m. Wednesday.

Each hourlong episode follows three aspiring actors through their first movie, a low-budget genre film. The twist is that the flick is a fake, with everyone else on the set, from the director to the other actors and lighting guys, in on the joke.

Fittingly, the Monsterfest edition is "Croc Park," a hilariously awful pseudo-indie film about four twentysomethings who encounter man-eating crocodiles in the north woods. Crafty, those crocs: Who'd expect them in hip-deep snow?

Like vampires, these evil reptiles recruit as they chomp, converting each new gore-splattered human victim into another bloodthirsty crocodile. As one of the actress-victims puts it: "You can bite into my body, but you'll never bite into my soul!"

Future episodes will feature guest stars Erik Estrada in a fake Mafia movie, "Big Bang"; Rachel Hunter in a faux western, "The Committed"; and American Idol's Justin Guarini in a make-believe teen musical called -- I love this -- "Song Island."

Rapacious reptiles have starred in more real horror movies than you can flick a scaly tail at. They're one of the main categories considered in Hollywood's Creepiest Creatures (8 p.m. Saturday, Animal Planet), an inventory of frightful fauna hosted by that pun-loving mistress of the dark, Elvira.

Name your nightmare beast, and it's here: the bats of Dracula, the rats of Willard, the baleful bird of The Raven, the killer canine of Cujo, the sinister felines of The Curse of the Cat People, the multiple sharks of all those Jaws-es, David Hedison (1958) and Jeff Goldblum (1986) as victims of bad buzz in The Fly.

You and your kids could actually learn something worth knowing, too. Bats, it turns out, are not common in Transylvania. Sharks, according to one expert in the two-hour special, kill fewer human beings per year than falling vending machines.

Animal Planet's "Howl-o-ween Week," also hosted by Elvira, features another premiere, Nature's Vampires (encoring at 8 and 11 p.m. Thursday), on real-life bloodsuckers, and a slew of repeats on killer bees, hissing cockroaches, piranhas, anacondas, etc. For more information, see animal.discovery.com.

No Halloween TV list should fail to mention the creme de la creepy, that half-hour of animated terror known as The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror XV (8 p.m. Nov. 7, Fox).

This year's three mini-horror-ha-ha's are "The Ned Zone," "In the Belly of the Boss" and "Four Beheadings and a Funeral."